A memory system may be used under different conditions, which place different performance requirements on the memory in the memory system. To account for these different conditions, memories in some memory systems may be operated in a “normal” mode or in a “burst” mode, in which a higher-than-average performance by the memory system satisfies a higher-than-average number of write commands from a host controller. For example, when a memory system is part of a video camera device, raw video shot by the camera is stored in the camera's RAM, and then compressed and transferred to the memory in the memory system. In such systems, the memory matches the average rate of compressed video, and, as such, the burst mode is used to provide a write performance that matches the rate at which the video data is produced. For example, in some memory systems, the burst mode may be capable of supporting a storage rate of 160 MB/s for 4 GB, while the normal mode may support rates of up to 80 MB/s for 12 GB.
To achieve the higher-than-average performance, the memory system can store data in a single-level cell (SLC) partition instead of a multi-level cell (MLC) partition, as writing to SLC cells is faster than writing to MLC cells. Alternatively, instead of writing to a dedicated SLC partition, if the memory supports a dynamic configuration where a memory cell can be used either as an SLC cell or an MLC cell on demand, certain memory cells can be configured to be SLC cells during a burst mode. SLC mode is faster than MLC mode but consumes memory resources (i.e., the memory cells) at a rate that is at least twice the rate of MLC storage. Therefore, the capacity of a memory working in burst mode is smaller than the capacity of the memory working in non-burst mode where MLC cells would be used.